Alto System Project: Dan Ingalls demonstrates Smalltalk

Be prepared to be amazed with what Xerox PARC and others were doing, while Bell Labs was busy pushing for UNIX. "Eric Bier Demonstrates Cedar" link "Emulating a Xerox Star (8010) Information System Running the Xerox Development Environment (XDE) 5.0" link "Documents as User Interfaces Video Demo" link "SYMBOLICS S-PACKAGES 3D GRAPHICS AND ANIMATION DEMO" link "Alto System Project: Dan Ingalls demonstrates Smalltalk" ▶ this video "Action!, the worlds first dynamic interface builder - 1988" (Interface Builder percursor, written in Lisp) link "The Interlisp programming environment" link And the cherry, how Lucid used Lisp ideas for their Energize C++ IDE, including an image based format for AST storage link link

It is a bit hard to explain in an HN comment something that requires live experience, You can start by having a look at, link "Eric Bier Demonstrates Cedar" link "Alto System Project: Dan Ingalls demonstrates Smalltalk" ▶ this video "SYMBOLICS CONCORDIA ONLINE DOCUMENTATION HYPER TEXT MARKUP 1985" link You can see how NeXT builds on many of these concepts on the famous "NeXT vs Sun" marketing piece, link Sun also had some ideas along these lines with NeWS, "NeWS: A Networked and Extensible Window System," link Naturally OS/2, BeOS, Windows, macOS, iOS, and even Android share some of the ideas. Now, before I proceed note that actually modern Linux distributions have all the tooling to make these concepts happen, but it fails short to have everyone agree on a proper stack. So basically, the main idea is to have a proper full stack in place for developing a Workstation computer as one single experience, from bottom all the way to the top. On Xerox's case, they used bytecode with in-CPU execution via programmable microcode loaded on boot, and later on just a thin native glue on top of host OS. The environments had frameworks / modules for the whole OS stack, supported distributed computing, embedded of data structures across applications (OLE can trace its roots back to these ideas), REPLs that not only could interact with the whole OS (commands, modules, running applications), it was also possible to break into the debugger, change the code and redo the failed instructions. Linux distributions get kind of close to these ideas via GNOME and KDE, but the whole concept breaks, because they aren't part of a full OS, rather a bunch of frameworks, that have to deal with classical UNIX applications and communities that rather use fvwm (like I was doing in 1995), and use a bunch of xterms, than having frameworks talking over D-BUS, embedding documents, all integrated with a REPL capable of handling structured data, and call any kind of executable code (including .so, because the type information isn't available). And then every couple of years the sound daemon, graphics stack or whatever userspace layer gets redone, without any kind of compatibility, because it is open source so anyone that cares should just port whatever applications are relevant. It is quite telling that most Linux conferences end up being about kernel, new filesystems, network protocols, and seldom about how to have something like a full BeOS stack on Linux. Even freedesktop can only do so much.

Anything based on the workstation concepts explored at Xerox PARC, and further pursued at ETHZ, TI and Genera. Bitsavers has all the necessary papers and manuals, and computer museum as well. Here are some video sessions. "Yesterday's Computer of Tomorrow: The Xerox Alto │Smalltalk-76 Demo" link "Alto System Project: Dan Ingalls demonstrates Smalltalk" ▶ this video "Eric Bier Demonstrates Cedar" link "The Final Demonstration of the Xerox 'Star' computer" link The end of the road from Plan 9, Inferno. link link